the great american blog entry

I finished that non-fiction story I was working on about my rooooommate second year. It happened like this. I was reading The Language of Baklava, and the dad in that book reminds me of that roommate's boyfriend in mannerism, so I got this feeling in me, this stirring, that I needed to talk about him.

So I grabbed a comp book that was near the bed and the crappy pen that happened to be sitting there and started writing furiously.... Which was nice, to write in bed, but then I had to type it all, which is so boring, but I edited a little while I typed.

Last night I had Erik read it, and he really liked it, but I don't know what to do with it, like should I try submitting it somewhere, and would others like to read this, or should I just throw it into the zine and forget about it. I write whatever I'm moved to, and I don't know what editors of literary journals are interested in, but I think they like The Great American Essay or The Great American Poem, which I never write--I never write something earth-shaking and definitive. Where was I talking about this the other day? I'm chipping away at the silence rather than producing the end-all and be-all, a different project. I'm not writing about Life, Death, and Man's Quest for Meaning, I mean. It's about a spider tattoo, an abortion, and when she lied about dropping a sock on the stairs. Well, maybe I should just distill it all into a poem and throw the prose idea out the window.

Last night I got very sad and Erik comforted me. Then I got happy right before bedtime, which is a bad habit, because we stay up giggling, and the sleep debt accumulates like interest.

Speaking of, we owed a collection agency more than three hundred dollars for this medical mess of a lying clinic refusing to pay something they said they would when they couldn't find a vein and sent me to a lab to get my blood drawn for this very expensive test--anyway, I'm finally paying it, which is so nice, and maybe our credit rating will go up now.